Buyer’s Remorse I never seem to learn my lesson. I am talking about going cheap on some things. I recently purchased an inexpensive battery powered circular saw. I thought it would be good enough for the job I had of cutting up wood that at the most was 1 inch thick and most were thinner. I looked at a DeWalt which was listed at 179 dollars and on sale for 136 dollars and said to myself I know this is a great saw, but I just need a saw for this one small job and it would probably sit in the closet after that. I decided to buy one which looked very professional and was on sale for 59 dollars. Big mistake. Sure, I saved 77 dollars but my new saw struggled to cut those 1 inch square pieces of wood and my ¼ inch planks. It was saw, bog down, pull the saw out and try again and again. In truth I finished the job but it was very aggravating and seemed like it took forever. I could have even bought a Skil saw on sale for 79 dollars I found out later. Sometimes it is not that people tried to save some cash when they bought something, because they may have spent too much on a luxury item and found they either never use it or it has more features than they will ever use. There are quite a few cases of those people who purchased luxury cars and then regretted it later on for many different reasons. One being the price of maintaining them. Another was the car has so many features they never got around to using them all and if they decided to sell the car it had lost a considerable amount of money once they took it out of the showroom. Buyer’s remorse is probably something we all have experienced at one time or another. Did you ever purchase a license to use a certain piece of software for a year or more and then find out it wasn’t very good or you found you really had no use for it. To make matters worse did you ever find when you tried to cancel the subscription the next year, you couldn’t figure out how to do it on their website and they had no phone number and you had a hard time finding out their email address? I think this has happened to many of us. This is one of the reasons I say always pay with a credit card because you can always cancel the next payment with them. One time when my daughter was looking to buy her first house, her and her new husband were all excited and wanted me to see what they were going to buy. When I got there I was aghast. There was this run down house which was being pitched by the real estate salesman to them. It looked like a home which belonged to drug addicted people who decided to destroy it. I told them they were making a big mistake and they could do much better and pointed out all the things wrong with the house and thank goodness they listened to me. They would have regretted that buy for the rest of their lives. It is needless to say, but the salesman was very angry with me. Buying a home can be a very emotional thing. Sometimes first time buyers get so excited and never think about the fact the sales person is only there to make a commission and that is their job. It is one thing to sell a home as a fixer upper and let the buyer know it needs a lot of work, but it is another to not even mention that hoping the buyers won’t realize what they are getting into. I let that salesman know this. One thing I didn’t realize was the fact some places keep track of buyer dissatisfaction. One of those places stated it went up during the Covid period. I wondered why would that be? Then I gave it some more thought and came up with an idea. I figured more people were staying home and buying more stuff. Some of this stuff might have been tied to entertainment, some to food and some might have come about because people were browsing the internet more and seeing things they thought they wanted. I don’t know if I am correct or not, but it is the only reasons I can think of except for buying more gifts. I knew one person who had a hard time buying anything. They would agonize over every purchase. They had a real problem. They would do research and more research. It didn’t matter what the price of the item was. It the item cost 5 dollars or more forget it, they would research it to death and at the end of all this research they would say to me they didn’t know what to do. If it was an inexpensive item I would say just buy it you don’t have much to lose. Most of the time they would just pass on it. I hope in my old age I never get that way. I have a friend who knew someone who was one of the cheapest people I ever met except for a guy I worked with. He was so cheap he would take expired coupons and go to a store with them and when he was told they were expired he would demand to see the manager and get in a big argument and sometimes the store would actually give in. I think they didn’t want customers seeing them arguing in the middle of the store. The guy I worked with took the cake. He was so cheap he would go to the vegetable store and take the lettuce and stuff which was being thrown out, put it in a plastic bag and eat it for a week for lunch at work. It wasn’t that he was that poor, he wanted every penny to buy stocks with. He would go to the store for us on the break because they would give him a free donut. One time I gave him money to pick up the newspaper and when he gave it to me I noticed it was the one I have read the day before. I asked him what was he doing. He admitted he found the paper from the day before; pocketed my money and thought I wouldn’t notice the difference. Wow! He never had buyer’s remorse because he never paid for anything. He drove a very old car and when it finally broke down on the highway, he took the plates off and left it.
|
